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Oracle discontinues Ruby/Rails support for NetBeans

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Re: Oracle discontinues Ruby/Rails support for NetBeans

#111

Post by DanielRibeiro »

jamesbritt wrote: post #64
w1ntermute wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How widely is NetBeans used by the RoR community? I'm (purely) guessing not very widely at all.

I've used it for (J)Ruby GUI development. The built-in WYSYWYG editor is pretty sweet, so Netbeans works very well as as an all-in-one dev tool for building JRuby + Swing + Monkeybars apps. I've never used it for any Rails development, and found the coupling of the Ruby packages with Rails gems, and the presumption in the add-ons that any Ruby project was a Rails project, a bit dopey. There seems to be no way to inst…

I've also used for several sinatra apps. Their refactoring, autocomplete, debugging and unit test/rpec is superb. Not to mention it supports Mercurial and is free, what Intellij's Ruby IDE doesn't (the core is open and free, and supports mercurial, but their ruby thing is not a plugin, and it is not compatible with the good stuff). Yeah, its a loss, but they've been neglecting it for a while, so it is sad.

Re: Oracle discontinues Ruby/Rails support for NetBeans

#112

Post by 6ren »

hopeless wrote: post #55
fierarul wrote: post #50

The most important parts are: > To maintain that objective and capitalize on the JDK 7 release themes [...] it is necessary that our engineering resources are committed to [...] NetBeans IDE 7.0. (from http://netbeans.org/community/news/show/1507.html ) and >However, we strongly encourage our community of NetBeans Ruby users and developers to volunteer to take on development of Ruby on Rails support for the NetBeans…

I think you're right. The intersection of interested Ruby developers + with Java experience + knowledge of the Netbeans platform + and motivation/time to maintain the plugin seems vanishingly small.

The only thing is that Ruby is still growing, and so represents possible future revenue. But Oracle aims for short-term profitability now... which you have to admit, has worked out pretty well for them.

Taking a wider view, I love the work to make things better (such as at Xerox PARC), but it hasn't made money for those companies. Which is partly why Sun no longer has any say in Java, or in general research, or indeed in anything at all.

Re: Oracle discontinues Ruby/Rails support for NetBeans

#113

Post by InclinedPlane »

melling wrote: post #58
msy wrote: post #39

You know between Java, Hudson and moves like this it feels like we're ripe for an Onion-style article about Oracle execs running out of ideas for pissing off the OSS community and so doing a road-trip around the country to individually insult every OSS developer and user in the most graphic and personal way they can think of.

Oracle has a profitable business model. It works for them. They have some open source projects that they no longer care to support. In the open source model, someone else is free to carry the torch. It should only require a few people to adopt the Ruby plugin. There are already lots of Netbeans plugins so the learning curve: http://plugins.netbeans.org/PluginPortal Complaining about Oracle, or any profit driven compa…

They have a profitable business model... for now.

They are doing an excellent job of pissing off all of the people who make the purchasing decisions for Oracle products. This isn't the best idea.

Re: Oracle discontinues Ruby/Rails support for NetBeans

#114

Post by barmstrong »

grandalf wrote: post #53

Is anybody actually using NetBeans for Ruby? I tried it very early in my exploration of Ruby, but quickly switched to gedit, and eventually emacs (using technomancy's emacs starter kit). Now that I use emacs, any other editor (particularly one that requires a hand on the mouse) feels like an RSI producing nightmare.

I use it daily at CarWoo.com

IDE's still have a few killer features over text editors that I miss when I don't have them.

Re: Oracle discontinues Ruby/Rails support for NetBeans

#115

Post by fleitz »

ebtalley wrote: post #98
vtail wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why this move should piss off anybody in the OSS community. Oracle is a private company and as such has only obligations to its shareholders. They may or may not support and/or promote OSS projects as they see fit, same as every one of us. It's their free choice.

Look at what kind of headway corporations like google have made in the mind of consumers when they go above and beyond the shareholder mantra. Oracle might make short term gains on their terms but they have started to poison a whole new generation of developers.

Webpages are not a complement to Oracle's business model, thus what makes sense for Oracle and Google to open source are vastly different. If you look at what Google open sources, it's all compliments to their business model. Google doesn't open source technology that it makes money from.

As to going above and beyond in regards to open source, you'd have to look at where NetBeans came from Sun. Look where all that open source got them.

Re: Oracle discontinues Ruby/Rails support for NetBeans

#116

Post by oziumjinx »

jrockway wrote: post #104
vtail wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle is not a person to make such a decision; it is its shareholders who should decide how they want to spend their money. I wouldn't want to have a tax (as an Oracle investor or a private citizen) to support OSS. I may want to contribute my money and/or code as a donation , but that will be my own choice.

I don't want to support Oracle's sailboat racing. So, I don't own any Oracle shares. Pretty simple, isn't it?

Larry Ellison pays for that out of pocket.

Re: Oracle discontinues Ruby/Rails support for NetBeans

#117

Post by bkmartin »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #113
melling wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle has a profitable business model. It works for them. They have some open source projects that they no longer care to support. In the open source model, someone else is free to carry the torch. It should only require a few people to adopt the Ruby plugin. There are already lots of Netbeans plugins so the learning curve: http://plugins.netbeans.org/PluginPortal Complaining about Oracle, or any profit driven compa…

They have a profitable business model... for now. They are doing an excellent job of pissing off all of the people who make the purchasing decisions for Oracle products. This isn't the best idea.

No, they are pissing off open source tech savvy minded people. The enterprise pointy haired bosses could care less about a RoR plugin for Netbeans.

Re: Oracle discontinues Ruby/Rails support for NetBeans

#118

Post by noibl »

vtail wrote: post #97
msy wrote: post #39

You know between Java, Hudson and moves like this it feels like we're ripe for an Onion-style article about Oracle execs running out of ideas for pissing off the OSS community and so doing a road-trip around the country to individually insult every OSS developer and user in the most graphic and personal way they can think of.

I don't understand why this move should piss off anybody in the OSS community. Oracle is a private company and as such has only obligations to its shareholders. They may or may not support and/or promote OSS projects as they see fit, same as every one of us. It's their free choice.

The reason is that Oracle inherited the stewardship of so many important projects when they bought Sun. After the purchase they have not said 'OK guys, new management; we don't do the open source thing; so long.' Rather they put the knife into various projects in different ways, seemingly at random. This behaviour taken in sum has an unsettling effect on the outlook of any project that Oracle is still involved with. How long will Netbeans itself survive? It's anybody's guess.

It's not just one case of support being withdrawn. It's Russian roulette.

Re: Oracle discontinues Ruby/Rails support for NetBeans

#119

Post by aantix »

hamletdrc2 wrote: post #34
hopeless wrote: post #22

Nooooo.... I've gradually moved away from NetBeans as a general Ruby/Rails editor but I often came back for the great debugging support. Any suggestion for alternative Rails debuggers?

I have heard positive things said about RubyMine from JetBrains. However, it is not free and some complain of slow project parse times at startup. Disclaimer: I do have an off and on professional relationship with JetBrains.

RubyMine is amazing for large Rails projects. I can jump between methods in different modules, classes even across gems (a simple command-click on the method, class or module name). You can quickly traverse source trees without the cumbersome grep/find that you'd do in a basic text editor.

Running specific tests is also a snap; just place your cursor in the desired spec and command-shift-r (built in support for spork).

I'm not in any affiliated with JetBrains (swear); just a satisfied customer.

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